Dogs study us and make judgments about whether humans are good people and avoid those they don’t like, according to a 2017 study in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. Dogs have a “core morality” and remember people who are hostile to their humans, the authors say.

Our four-legged friends read the tone and pitch of our voices and signals from our eyes, through the lens of canine language.

He also cleverly adapted a human evaluation tool — the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories — to determine the mental age of dogs.

Coren’s research — based on what dogs can understand relative to toddlers — has found domesticated canines have a mental age of about two or three years, though your furry friend may well be at the lower end of that spectrum.

The kind of intelligence they display varies widely by breed, according to professor Marc Bekoff, a professor and author of 31 books on animals, intelligence and ethics.

Border collies, poodles and retrievers are the Einsteins of the dog world, while chihuahuas and beagles are at the other end of the scale.

Bekoff — writing in Psychology Today — puts the onus on us to do a better job of reading our furry friends with the widely cited quote: “I used to look at Smokey and think, ‘If you were a little smarter, you could tell me what you were thinking,’ and he’d look at me like he was saying, ‘If you were a little smarter, I wouldn’t have to.’”

Can you read your dog?

Fear. Mal the Belgian shepherd was used to model in a study that found people were accurate at interpreting some canine emotions, by Tina Bloom and Harris Friedman.Tina Bloom /
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People have been selectively breeding canine for millennia, and along the way domesticated dogs have developed facial expressions that border on human, a trait we prize.

“Anger and happiness were the easiest to read,” she said. “Amazingly, experienced people had a harder time reading anger, and they most often mistook it for happy.”

Bloom used tricks such as a jack-in-the-box, Pepto Bismol, a “bad guy” attack, and praise to elicit expressions of surprise, disgust, anger and happiness, among others.

Her 50 volunteers were able to identify happiness 88 per cent of the time and anger 70 per cent of the time. Almost half could see when Mal was frightened, while fewer than one in five could pick out surprise and disgust.

People who spend less time with dogs were better at reading anger than people who spend a lot of time with dogs, perhaps because they minimize the dog’s capacity for anger, she said.

“I can’t tell you how many times when I used to train dogs, people would say, ‘and he just bit me out of the blue.’” she said “But, then I would be watching the dog, thinking, ‘Don’t you see that? He is not happy. He wants to bite you right now.’”

Human-canine relations can be greatly improved by better training people to read the subtleties of dog language. A bite is traumatizing for the victim, but potentially a death sentence for the dog.

Angry.Tina Bloom /
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How a dog bares its teeth is especially important, said Coren. When a dominant dog opens his mouth like a C, you see the teeth but not the gums. A fearful dog will pull back harder to reveal more gums.

“The ears are exquisite signals,” he said. “When prick-eared dogs are interested they turn their ears slightly forward. If the ears turn forward and slightly down that’s an aggressive signal. You read the V between the ears and the flatter it gets the more distressed the dog is — that could mean aggression or fear.”

Watch for the crescent white in the sclera of a dog’s eye, it may be a sign of extreme fear, as though the dog is being confined or protecting something.

“The eye signals are the ones people tend not to read, like staring,” he said. “That is a serious warning sign (for aggression).”

Tail wagging is the “most misread signal” because people assume wagging indicates a happy dog. Not quite. A high tail with short wags is a dominance signal and a warning. A low tail with a slow sweep could indicate fear.

Happy.Tina Bloom /
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“It drives me crazy because I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times I’ve seen a mother say, ‘oh look the dog is wagging its tail, you can go pet him,” Coren said.

The happy tail wag is when the tail is midway to low and swings back and forth, bringing the hips with it.

You can do better

In the past, Coren gave one-hour workshops to Grade Three classes in bite prevention that focused on reading dog expressions.

Kids are by far the most common victims of dog bites, because so much of their behaviour mimics prey, which triggers deeply instinctive canine attacks.

Their shrill voices and screams and panicked uncoordinated running sound and look like wounded prey. Running away triggers the dog’s instinct to chase, with disastrous results. Even an outstretched hand with splayed fingers can look like a mouthful of teeth from the dog’s point of view.

“What we teach them is be a tree,” he said. “Trees don’t run, so stand still. Then fold your branches — so you don’t reach for the dog — and stare at your roots, not the dog.”

Informal data collected through the schools suggest that the kids who get the one-hour class experience an 80-per-cent reduction in dog bites. Other kids in the family see a 60-per-cent reduction, as the students tend to instruct their younger siblings when they meet dogs in the park.

People who hug their dogs put them in extreme distress, almost universally, according to Coren’s research. Dogs are fast-moving animals with running as their main defence and hugging gives them nowhere to run.

“We looked at about 250 pictures that people had posted to social media and looked for signs of distress and 82 per cent of dogs were basically saying ‘stop this.’

“Well that caused a firestorm from some dog owners, but only seven per cent of dogs were reacting positively,” he said.

Make your dog smarter

Your pet may not be a genius, but he can learn to do plenty with your help and a few simple rules.

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